... dark matter could really be invisible interstellar unicorns. But a simpler explanation is that it's just some kind of elementary particle that we haven't identified yet.
You can take that argument up with the IAU - let me know how far you get with that. And whether or not you like the term "metals" for elements heavier than helium, the fact is that there weren't any of them around for the first several billion years after the big bang... so no planets.
You appear to accept that there were insufficient metals around... so what were these planets made of? Bear in mind that "metals" in this context include such things as silicon, aluminum, and even carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. Excepting hydrogen and helium (and tiny amounts of lithium), there was no matter at all in the early universe. There was nothing to make planets out of until several generations of stars had manufactured sufficient heavy elements to make them.
I look at the plethora of life on Terra and it's hard not jump to the conclusion that if there's liquid water, there's life of some sort. Doesn't even have to necessarily be liquid water too. Hydrocarbons would work.
Sorry, but that just doesn't follow. I look at the plethora of houses in my neighborhood, and conclude that the entire earth must be as populated as Northern Virginia. The fact is that you need at least a few examples before you can generalize in this way.
As has been pointed out above, for most of the history of the galaxy prior to the existence of the earth, there were insufficient metals (per the astronomer's definition of metals) to produce solid planets. So unless your aliens were made of hydrogen and helium, they just weren't around much before us.
We don't know if space travel between stars is possible. Faster then light travel would change the rules...
Actually, we have a pretty good idea that it's not, at least at FTL speeds. Barring some development in physics that's absolutely, completely out of left field, we know that it would take an infinite amount of energy just to get to light speed, and FTL isn't possible at all. And even at high relativistic speeds, you're talking a years or even generations to get anywhere. Who's going to pony up the cash to do something like that?
Unless these conjectural aliens were made entirely of hydrogen and helium (ok, maybe a tiny bit of lithium), their home planets couldn't have formed too long before earth. There just weren't enough metals before them to form any solid bodies.
Doubtful. We already know that "dark matter" isn't just regular matter that doesn't happen to be emitting light - it's some wholly different thing that doesn't even interact with electromagnetism... meaning it's not made up of protons & electrons. So it couldn't be Dyson spheres, at least none that we'd be able to recognize as such.
The Navy was fairly big on this for a while. Instead of a normal desk, you had piece of plate glass forming the desktop surface where your monitor would normally go. The monitor was then placed on a special shelf under the desk at an angle. I guess the arrangement was meant to save space, but in practice, it sucked hard. For one thing, the monitor/shelf assembly under the desk made it tough to stretch out your legs. Also, any blank space on my desk tends to get stuff set on it, which meant I was constantly having to excavate to find my monitor. And last, but probably most - it was an ergonomic nightmare. You had to constantly have your head pointed down, which got painful very quickly. It's one of those things that probably sounded like a good idea at the time, but never worked in real life.
Hey, nice pivot there. Whereas the GP points out that the actual number of reactors required would be almost 11,000, you run with the "all the new reactors are the size of the world's largest" figure (which is actually seven reactor plants at one site), and then round THAT number down by more than 10% to get your "about a thousand" figure. I wish I could do nuclear math when working out my expenses!
Even in these days of instant communication, the Navy still has a strong tradition of independent action. "It's easier to get forgiveness than permission" is still the operating phrase (to my knowledge, I retired a year or so ago). But my sense is that this is a much bigger problem for the Army - from the outside looking in, it seems that they are very dependent on guidance from "higher".
This joke is a metaphor for a lot of stuff that goes on in the Navy, but I'm not sure what's funny about it. The LCDR DID get the flag problem fixed. He looked at the problem, assigned the right people to it, and the job got done. Of course, when offered praise from the CAPT, he should have been sure to point out that the seaman did the actual fixing and deserved credit for it. The beauty of the situation is that there's no limited supply of praise - the entire chain of command can and should get credit for successful mission accomplishment.
LCDR's make kind of a lot of money to be spending their time climbing ladders and fixing flags themselves. Tasks should be delegated to the lowest level at which they can be accomplished - if a seaman can accomplish a task, he/she should be assigned to it.
It is every soldiers job to question the legal validity of their orders
That's all well and good as far as it goes, but in the case of Iraq, the orders to invade were probably legal, or at least ambiguous enough that ordinary soldiers were correct to obey them. You really don't want to turn every E-3 into an amateur international lawyer - the military would fall apart. Orders given by superior officer should be presumed to be lawful unless you have a compelling reason to believe that they are not. Some of the stuff that went on at Abu Ghraib, for example, should have been stopped on this basis.
And just so this is clear, while I believe that it was likely legal (in a narrow sense) to invade Iraq, I don't believe at all that it was the right thing to do. It was probably the biggest blunder of the century.
It would be a lot easier to compare the performance of these systems if, you know, they all used the same scale for the y-axis. Even better, if you could put them all into the same graph... although it might get too busy.
... but what's stopping me is that I'm not a programmer, which is an unfortunate condition that I expect most of even the Slashdot-reading population suffers from. Some of us also have to deal with things like "work" and "family".
I'm not trying to give anyone a hard time here, but it's important to realize that not that many people have the time or experience/education necessary to do this work... so when you're competing for the labor of a relatively small pool of people, it's important that the work be made as attractive as possible. I'm frankly not all that informed about the state of the X.org project, but it sounds like they have some issues with that.
I'm running Leopard on an older system - a Powerbook G4 from 2004 or so. On my machine, entering and recovering from "sleep" beats the pants off any Windows laptop I've ever had. I get very few updates, and the few that I do get are about the only times I ever NEED to restart. Also, I've never had the "out of memory" error, ever. I wonder if your hardware is defective?
... that "rapid growth in the aviation sector continues apace". For one thing, the cost of jet fuel is going to continue to rise, which is going to make continued growth in air travel cost prohibitive. For another, there's simply no more room at airports to add flights, even if cost wasn't a consideration. I think that air travel is going to remain flat at most, and more likely, will decline at least somewhat.
Really, if they have a way to safely remove the infection, they should go right ahead. Preventing harm from someone without risking any other harm should not require informed consent.
"... without risking any other harm" is the operative phrase here. I guarantee you that if you set loose self-replicating repair agents, you ARE risking other harm. It's not possible to exhaustively test the reaction of every hardware/software combination in the world, which means that by definition, you can't guarantee nothing bad would happen to anyone. There's inherent risk here.
... his wife's blood was found in large quantities in his car, he was known to have destroyed evidence relating to the case (the car seat, various computer files, scrubbing of various items in the car and house), he evaded police attempting to question him, and he was in possession of thousands in cash and his passport when finally apprehended. While opinions can differ about what the jury "should" have decided, it's hardly true that there was no evidence of foul play here.
The quote provided in the parent is a classic example - the Microsoft fanboy's whine of "How come I have to unbundle my browser, etc, when none of the other kids have to?" The answer, of course, being that the other kids are not convicted monopolists, and therefore can't unlawfully leverage their dominant position in operating systems to take over other markets. So, betaguy... shut up already.
He spent zero hours trying to devise how to play it back. Scott's purpose was not to record and play back sound, it was to record sound in visual form for some kind of subsequent analysis. It doesn't sound like he ever even conceived of playing it back.
You may not be able to put a bootloader written in Java on the unused sectors of a floppy, but that says nothing about whether assembly is obsolete. In fact, it weakens your point, since floppies themselves are obsolete.
eBay's data shows that sellers are eight times more likely to retaliate in kind against negative feedback...
Umm, "eight times more likely" than what? Than buyers are to retaliate against sellers? Than they were at some point in the past? Than they are to retaliate against positive feedback? It's kind of a common compositional sin to drop the "than what" part of a "more likely than" statement, but usually you can figure it out from context. In this case, I can't even imagine a way to complete the sentence that makes any sense whatsoever - which leads me to believe that someone pulled this figure out of thin air.
Slashdot Mirror
... dark matter could really be invisible interstellar unicorns. But a simpler explanation is that it's just some kind of elementary particle that we haven't identified yet.
You can take that argument up with the IAU - let me know how far you get with that. And whether or not you like the term "metals" for elements heavier than helium, the fact is that there weren't any of them around for the first several billion years after the big bang... so no planets.
You appear to accept that there were insufficient metals around... so what were these planets made of?
Bear in mind that "metals" in this context include such things as silicon, aluminum, and even carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. Excepting hydrogen and helium (and tiny amounts of lithium), there was no matter at all in the early universe. There was nothing to make planets out of until several generations of stars had manufactured sufficient heavy elements to make them.
Sorry, but that just doesn't follow. I look at the plethora of houses in my neighborhood, and conclude that the entire earth must be as populated as Northern Virginia. The fact is that you need at least a few examples before you can generalize in this way.
As has been pointed out above, for most of the history of the galaxy prior to the existence of the earth, there were insufficient metals (per the astronomer's definition of metals) to produce solid planets. So unless your aliens were made of hydrogen and helium, they just weren't around much before us.
Actually, we have a pretty good idea that it's not, at least at FTL speeds. Barring some development in physics that's absolutely, completely out of left field, we know that it would take an infinite amount of energy just to get to light speed, and FTL isn't possible at all. And even at high relativistic speeds, you're talking a years or even generations to get anywhere. Who's going to pony up the cash to do something like that?
Unless these conjectural aliens were made entirely of hydrogen and helium (ok, maybe a tiny bit of lithium), their home planets couldn't have formed too long before earth. There just weren't enough metals before them to form any solid bodies.
Doubtful. We already know that "dark matter" isn't just regular matter that doesn't happen to be emitting light - it's some wholly different thing that doesn't even interact with electromagnetism... meaning it's not made up of protons & electrons. So it couldn't be Dyson spheres, at least none that we'd be able to recognize as such.
The Navy was fairly big on this for a while. Instead of a normal desk, you had piece of plate glass forming the desktop surface where your monitor would normally go. The monitor was then placed on a special shelf under the desk at an angle. I guess the arrangement was meant to save space, but in practice, it sucked hard. For one thing, the monitor/shelf assembly under the desk made it tough to stretch out your legs. Also, any blank space on my desk tends to get stuff set on it, which meant I was constantly having to excavate to find my monitor. And last, but probably most - it was an ergonomic nightmare. You had to constantly have your head pointed down, which got painful very quickly. It's one of those things that probably sounded like a good idea at the time, but never worked in real life.
Sean
All of us except the Slashdot readers.
Hey, nice pivot there. Whereas the GP points out that the actual number of reactors required would be almost 11,000, you run with the "all the new reactors are the size of the world's largest" figure (which is actually seven reactor plants at one site), and then round THAT number down by more than 10% to get your "about a thousand" figure. I wish I could do nuclear math when working out my expenses!
Even in these days of instant communication, the Navy still has a strong tradition of independent action. "It's easier to get forgiveness than permission" is still the operating phrase (to my knowledge, I retired a year or so ago). But my sense is that this is a much bigger problem for the Army - from the outside looking in, it seems that they are very dependent on guidance from "higher".
This joke is a metaphor for a lot of stuff that goes on in the Navy, but I'm not sure what's funny about it. The LCDR DID get the flag problem fixed. He looked at the problem, assigned the right people to it, and the job got done. Of course, when offered praise from the CAPT, he should have been sure to point out that the seaman did the actual fixing and deserved credit for it. The beauty of the situation is that there's no limited supply of praise - the entire chain of command can and should get credit for successful mission accomplishment.
LCDR's make kind of a lot of money to be spending their time climbing ladders and fixing flags themselves. Tasks should be delegated to the lowest level at which they can be accomplished - if a seaman can accomplish a task, he/she should be assigned to it.
That's all well and good as far as it goes, but in the case of Iraq, the orders to invade were probably legal, or at least ambiguous enough that ordinary soldiers were correct to obey them. You really don't want to turn every E-3 into an amateur international lawyer - the military would fall apart. Orders given by superior officer should be presumed to be lawful unless you have a compelling reason to believe that they are not. Some of the stuff that went on at Abu Ghraib, for example, should have been stopped on this basis.
And just so this is clear, while I believe that it was likely legal (in a narrow sense) to invade Iraq, I don't believe at all that it was the right thing to do. It was probably the biggest blunder of the century.
It would be a lot easier to compare the performance of these systems if, you know, they all used the same scale for the y-axis. Even better, if you could put them all into the same graph... although it might get too busy.
... but what's stopping me is that I'm not a programmer, which is an unfortunate condition that I expect most of even the Slashdot-reading population suffers from. Some of us also have to deal with things like "work" and "family".
I'm not trying to give anyone a hard time here, but it's important to realize that not that many people have the time or experience/education necessary to do this work... so when you're competing for the labor of a relatively small pool of people, it's important that the work be made as attractive as possible. I'm frankly not all that informed about the state of the X.org project, but it sounds like they have some issues with that.
I'm running Leopard on an older system - a Powerbook G4 from 2004 or so. On my machine, entering and recovering from "sleep" beats the pants off any Windows laptop I've ever had. I get very few updates, and the few that I do get are about the only times I ever NEED to restart. Also, I've never had the "out of memory" error, ever. I wonder if your hardware is defective?
... that "rapid growth in the aviation sector continues apace". For one thing, the cost of jet fuel is going to continue to rise, which is going to make continued growth in air travel cost prohibitive. For another, there's simply no more room at airports to add flights, even if cost wasn't a consideration. I think that air travel is going to remain flat at most, and more likely, will decline at least somewhat.
Yeah. And books don't have spell-checkers either.
"... without risking any other harm" is the operative phrase here. I guarantee you that if you set loose self-replicating repair agents, you ARE risking other harm. It's not possible to exhaustively test the reaction of every hardware/software combination in the world, which means that by definition, you can't guarantee nothing bad would happen to anyone. There's inherent risk here.
... his wife's blood was found in large quantities in his car, he was known to have destroyed evidence relating to the case (the car seat, various computer files, scrubbing of various items in the car and house), he evaded police attempting to question him, and he was in possession of thousands in cash and his passport when finally apprehended. While opinions can differ about what the jury "should" have decided, it's hardly true that there was no evidence of foul play here.
The quote provided in the parent is a classic example - the Microsoft fanboy's whine of "How come I have to unbundle my browser, etc, when none of the other kids have to?" The answer, of course, being that the other kids are not convicted monopolists, and therefore can't unlawfully leverage their dominant position in operating systems to take over other markets. So, betaguy... shut up already.
He spent zero hours trying to devise how to play it back. Scott's purpose was not to record and play back sound, it was to record sound in visual form for some kind of subsequent analysis. It doesn't sound like he ever even conceived of playing it back.
You may not be able to put a bootloader written in Java on the unused sectors of a floppy, but that says nothing about whether assembly is obsolete. In fact, it weakens your point, since floppies themselves are obsolete.
Umm, "eight times more likely" than what? Than buyers are to retaliate against sellers? Than they were at some point in the past? Than they are to retaliate against positive feedback? It's kind of a common compositional sin to drop the "than what" part of a "more likely than" statement, but usually you can figure it out from context. In this case, I can't even imagine a way to complete the sentence that makes any sense whatsoever - which leads me to believe that someone pulled this figure out of thin air.